Locked Roof
by Mediancat
Summary: A criminal gets away from Keith Mars; Veronica figures out how.


Dad and I were having dinner when a call came in on Dad's cell phone. "I'll be right there," he said. Then he stood up, grabbed his tuna salad sandwich, and raced for the front door.

"Hot date?" I asked.

"No, sweetie," he said. "That was Lamb. They've found the bastard. They want everyone there to lessen the chance of something going wrong."

"Be careful," I said.

"This guy's a coward," Dad said.

"Still."

"I will." He kissed my forehead. "Promise."

And then he was out the door, within about a minute of getting the call.

You may be wondering: Why would Don Lamb call my Dad for help with anything?

And the answer is, because _this_ guy needed to be caught. Even Vinnie Van Lowe was getting in on the act, and not being sleazy about it.

Even he, apparently, had some kind of moral standard.

Serial rapists tended to piss everyone off. Someone had been going after '09er wives. The cynical side of me said that if this guy had been going after friends and relatives of folks down in Weevil's part of town, they wouldn't have gotten nearly as fast a response; and the cynical side of me would have been absolutely right.

The cynical side of me, however, was being kept on a tight leash. Rape was rape, dammit, no matter who the victims happened to be. I wouldn't come close to wishing something like this even on Celeste Kane, and I loathed that woman. This bastard already had three victims, and nearly a fourth.

And I had had nothing to do with the investigation, other than serving as a cheering section.

I cleaned up dinner, walked Backup, did some homework, and waited for Dad as long as I could. Righ as I was about to go to bed, the door opened and Dad walked in.

The look on his face was not happiness.

"He got away," I said.

"And we have no idea how," Dad said. "Dammit!"

"What happened?"

"We chased him from a restaurant he'd been in to the Van Allen building – he moved very fast, it was hard to keep up with him – and he scrambled thirteen stories up the fire escape to the roof. Lamb and I chased after him – other people were covering the exits. We were maybe fifty feet behind him – but when we got to the roof, he was gone."

"Could he have gone through a window?"

"No, Don said he saw the man reach the roof."

"Roof access?" I asked.

"Trap door. Unopened. Barred from the inside, and no key on the outside."

"Someone on the inside willing to let him in?" Dad's face twisted a bit. "Look, it's sick, but you know there are people like that out there."

"Yeah, but none of them were in the building. Most of it's an office building; only people in there this time of night were in the shops on the first floor. And there was no way he could have had something like this planned, anyway; Jackson had no idea we were onto him."

"Jackson?"

Dad said, "Oh. Yeah. He'd been in the restaurant before and paid by credit card. Man's name is Dennis Jackson. Former college athlete – one of those types who was going to make it big before he got hurt."

"Could he have made it to another building?"

He shook his head. "It's got the street in front; to one side there's a vacant lot, on the other a four-story building, and across the alley a ten-story building – but the alley's a good thirty feet across. _Damn it!_ How the hell could he have gotten away?"

"You'll find out," I said. "You'll find out when you catch him."

XXXXXXXX

They never caught him.

Not alive, anyway.

Two days later he was spotted down in Weevil's section of Neptune, and the ensuing chase, involving the Sheriff's Department, Dad, and a couple of outraged private citizens ended up with Jackson hit by a shocked woman in an SUV when he tried to sprint across Santa Carolita Boulevard and fell about three lanes short.

Lamb and company were simultaneously crowing about the capture and double-and-triple-checking to make sure the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed and that the evidence showed they had the right guy; but even Dad wasn't doubting them on this one.

Which only went to prove that, properly motivated, Donnie could do his job well enough. Which said something about the dozens of times he half-assed it; but I promised not to be cynical here.

Dad was happy enough; he got paid and he got the satisfaction of getting a waste of oxygen off the streets. Still, though, I could tell he wasn't quite satisfied; how had Dennis Jackson gotten down off of the roof?

He couldn't figure it out.

So I'd figure it out for him.

That's what daughters do.

XXXXX

The next day, I went to the Van Allen building and talked my way to the roof; I wanted to get a look for myself at the scene of the vanishing.

Dad's description had been right on the money. The back alley was 28 feet, 8 inches across (yes, I measured); to the left and front were more or less straight drops to the street, and the building to the right was a good eighty feet down. There was no way anyone was going to lift the trap door from the outside when it was locked; and it would have required Spiderman to make it into one of the windows from up here.

I did my due diligence, though, and walked over the entire roof just to see if anyone missed anything or if there was something, no matter how weird, that someone could have used – a series of awnings, a construction crane, something like that. (Not that even Don Lamb would have missed a construction crane sitting out in the middle of the street.) No such luck.

There was nowhere he could have conveniently hidden, either; the place was flat. There wasn't even any electrical equipment for him to conveniently dodge around.

And he couldn't possibly have known that he would be chased up this particular building, so that ruled out confederates leaving the trap door open, or mountain climbing equipment, or flying a helicopter and dangling a rope ladder. (Not that they would have missed the sounds of a helicopter, either. Trust me, they do not make subtle noises, easily missed by the untrained observer.)

And he sure as hell hadn't climbed back down the fire escape; not while Lamb _and_ Dad were both on it, he hadn't.

So somehow the man had jumped down thirteen stories and walked away.

Neat trick if you can pull it off.

Then something occurred to me. Dad had said the man had been running very fast, so fast it was hard to keep up.

What if –?

I pulled out my cell phone.

"Leo, hey. Veronica. Quick question about Dennis Jackson . . . ."

XXXXXX

The next day I brought Dad back to the roof. I debated briefly about whether to include any members of the Sheriff's Department, then decided I'd clue Leo in later and let the rest of them twist. "You could have just told me in the office," Dad said with mock aggravation as we climbed out into the open air.

"And ruin my dramatic reveal? Heaven forbid," I said. "Look, we've gone through all this. Jackson didn't go through you, couldn't have jumped 150 feet or so to the ground, didn't open the trap door and couldn't have climbed down the side of the building. Right?"

"Right." We were now standing on the roof.

"And we're leaving out ridiculous explanations – he didn't fly, he didn't teleport, and he didn't change into a bird."

"Obviously."

"Well, then, not to get too cliché here, but there's a reason Holmes' maxim still holds: Once you've eliminated the impossible . . ."

Dad interrupted me, "Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Problem is, sweetie, we've eliminated _everything_. The man scampered of the roof and vanished into thin air."

"No, we haven't. We only thought we had. I called Deputy Leo yesterday. Like you, I'd assumed, when you mentioned Jackson had been a college athlete who missed his big break because he got hurt, that he'd been a football, basketball, or maybe a baseball player who couldn't go pro."

"Lamb never specified and it didn't seem important at the time."

"It was," I said. "He wasn't any of those. _He was a track star_. His big break wasn't the NFL; it was the 2000 Olympics. And guess what his signature event was?"

Keith Mars was no fool. "The long jump."

"The long jump. He regularly made 27 and a half feet and at least once topped 28."

"And his injury?"

"Car accident. Head trauma. Didn't affect his legs at all, but by the time he was able to move again, the trials were over. And the other building there being about 25 feet lower, and him knowing how to land – it was a risk, but it was the only one he could take."

"Right over our heads," Dad said, shaking his head. "The son of a bitch went right over our heads."

"I bet if you check _that_ building's fire escape you'll find his fingerprints all over it."

And they were.


End file.
